noun

• A person who pretends to have money, influence, or ability.

  More example sentences

  • ‘the camaraderie among tinhorns and crooks’
  • ‘tinhorn sharpers’
  • ‘But the larger, more frightening meaning of his statement is that in order to rid the world of a tinhorn dictator who posed no credible threat to the United States, it was just dandy to lie to the people.’
  • ‘He is no conservative, he's a crackpot - a tinhorn autocrat who has mistaken totalitarianism for conservatism.’
  • ‘After Urban Cowboy came out even here in Texas we endured several years of overdone, tinhorn headgear.’
  • ‘Other letters offer versions of a common logical fallacy: because Hitler had small beginnings, any tinhorn fanatic is likely to become a Hitler… when in fact most will not (and it is problematic to identify which if any might).’

  Synonyms

  poor-quality, second-rate, third-rate, substandard, low-grade, inferior, common, vulgar, shoddy, trashy, tawdry, tinny, brassy, worthless, meretricious, cheap and nasty, cheapjack, gimcrack, Brummagem, pinchbeck